80+ Tools for Successful Blogging

Here comes another list, all-in-one manual and how-to for any blogger regardless of blog’s size and purpose. Here you’ll find almost all necessary blogging tools and most of the top articles published in the last couple of years covering successful blogging, blog SEO, monetarization, maintenance and so on. Enjoy!

GENERAL BLOG TOOLS:

BlogBackupOnline – remote and automatic daily back of your entire blog.

Feedburner – one of the best tools to manage your feeds. Keeps you updated on the number subscribed users both through feeds and email, and provides lots of feed optimization options.

Feedblitz – email subscription service for your readers

Search Engine for Wordpress Plugins – custom rollyo search engine for wordpress plugins(incl. add to firefox search). More custom search engines for makeuseof users here

MyBloglog – social network for bloggers and blog readers. Not only lets you get to know your readers but also works as blog promo tool(we have it on our sidebar)

Performancing – full featured blog editor that sits right in your firefox browser and lets you easily post to your blog from any page

Dijjer | Redswoosh | Pando – 3 free, easy-to-use tools for reducing your bandwidth consumption, especially handy for blogs with large media files(ex; podcasts, vlogs)

Dead-Links – web based, site-wide broken link checker

Pingomatic – free and comprehensive ping tool. Lets you ping all major blog search engines at once. Wordpress users get it by default, not sure about others.

RSS Re-mixers – combine several feeds into one and publish it on your blog

Feedostyle – add RSS and Atom content from any feed to your website

Webshotspro – free instant thumbnails for your blog

SiteTimer – find out how long does it take for your website to load. If you want people to read your stuff or ateast see it make sure your blog should load in reasonable time, preferably in less then 4s.

Web based image resizing and editing tools – quick and powerful tools to work with images

Flock -blogging friendly browser (Although, combine firefox with above mentioned Performancing and you’ll get something even better)

Copyblogger – copywriting tips for your blog

BLOG WIDGETS:

Springwidgets – lots of cool widgets for your blog(clock, countdown timers, games, etc)

Majikwidget – some more widgets. (Note: It will cost you some $$$ but here you can actually ask them to design custom widget just for your blog)

Alexa | Alexaholic – interactive widgets from Alexa(traffic history graph, site stats and alexa traffic rank buttons) and Alexaholic (upto 5 domains traffic comparison charts)

PollDaddy – well-designed, easy-to-install voting polls for your blog

Chipin – simple flash application that allows you to keep people up-to-date on ‘Chip In’ events you organize. You may think of as a loaded widget for collecting donations

ChatCreator – custom chatbox for your blog

Tagcloud – free tagcloud for your blog (seems like service temporary unavailable, it’s not clear)

Videoegg – tool for adding videos to your posts

MapKit – easiest way to put community maps on your blog

Plugoo – chat box for your blog that lets you communicate with your visitors using your main messenger application (supports MSN, Yahoo, GoogleTalk)

Snap – increase your pageviews and enhance user experience by adding snap’s link preview functionality for all links on your blog (you can see it in action on any makeuseof page)

Eurekster – your own, constantly improving social search engine on your blog

TRAFFIC ANALYTICS:

a. General Analytics:

Statcounter | Getclicky | Google Analytics – applications to keep track of your blog visitors; lets you view total number of visits(hourly,daily,monthly….etc), number of pages readers visited, how long they stayed, browsers they used, from which page they left and so on

b. Advanced Analytics:

CrazyEgg | Measuremap(temp. unavailable) | Blogbeat – more advance monitoring tools, use them to optimize your site for maximum ROI/pageviews. Let analyze browsing and clicking behavior of your visitors to create optimum design template

BLOG PROMOTION and SEO :

101 web marketing ideas and tips – 90 useful blog/website promotion tips from Seopedia.com, one of the top SEO blogs on the web.

Seomoz: SEO Page Strength – awesome, all-in-one tool for quick assessment of websites’ importance and visibility in the eyes of search engines. Within 30 sec, you ca find out the number of links pointing to your website from major resources like wikipedia, del.icio.us, .edu and .gov domains, technorati, etc

Blog Search Engines – extensive list of blog search engines, directories, and web-based RSS aggregators

Adgridwork – free contextual advertising network where you can promote your blog on similar websites in exchange for couple of content-related text links on your site

Google Webmasters Central - must-use tool for any serious blogger. Lets you ensure that your site/blog is easily crawled and indexed by Google, keeps you up-to-date on crawling issues, broken links, number of indexed pages, website’s pagerank and latest index dates

Yahoo – SiteExplorer – similar to above but for Yahoo

Blogburst – increase your reach, visibility, and readership by making your blog available to network of leading publishers

Dmoz(free) | Yahoo! Directory Listings($299/year) – two major directories for submitting your blog

International Blog Search Engines

Best blog directories and RSS submission sites

News sites that send the most traffic

Competitio.us – this handy tool lets you track progress of your competitors

Technorati – top blog search engine and directory. Adding blog to it’s index should be the first step for any blogger

Blog Directory – Directory filled with blogs, a great way to improve your link popularity

WordPress and SEO – guide to optimizing your WordPress blog for search engines.

21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic

10 Techniques to Get More Comments on Your Blog

code validators: (use validators to make sure that your blog’s code and feeds meet standards and readable by search engines)

W3C validator – w3c markup validation service(checks web documents in HTML and XHTML formats for conformance to W3C Recommendations and other standards)

Feedvalidator | CSS validator – feed(atom,rss) and CSS validation services

Other Validators – RDF, semantic extractor, P3P, etc

HOW TO MAKE $$$ FROM YOUR BLOG?

Other advertising networks besides google adsense – lists almost all contextual advertising solutions on the web [JohnChow.com]

Problogger – blog that helps bloggers to monetize their blogs

ReviewMe | PayPerPost | SponsoredReviews – get paid for reviewing blogs, products and services

Text Link Ads – get paid for displaying text links

Blogads | FederatedMedia(A+) – advertising services which sell your adspace for you(for established blogs only)

Bloggerkit – easily add content-related Amazon products to your posts(or sidebar) and earn commissions from each generated sale

Advolcano – CPT (Cost Per Term) advertising solution. Here you aren’t getting paid for clicks or impressions but for displaying ads for specific time period (month, quarter… etc)

booBox.com – set of tools for bloggers and other website owners that will help them sell items they are writing about

Quantcast – open, website audience rating service for advertisers. Check it out and see what it says about your blog

INTERESTING

How much is your blog worth?

USEFUL ARTICLES

My 50 favorite blogging resources [by Neil Patel]
10 things you must do when changing wordpress themes
Upgrading WordPress
Installing WordPress
wordpress the complete post install checklist
80 wordpress themes
If Only I had Known! – template design tips for a new website
Who is using what for RSS?
Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully – in Ten Minutes, by Stephen King
Comprehensive list of 980+ Free WordPress 1.5 and 2.0 Themes
Weblog Usability – top 10 blog design mistakes
Blog Tutorial – tips for blog templates & blog design in Photoshop
10 Sure-Fire geadline formulas that work
7 More Sure-Fire geadline templates that work